Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

304 Chapter 11
nize would look rather different in, say Wyoming or Mississippi. We could
test that.
Thirty-one of the 34 who listed ‘‘pine’’ said they could recognize a pine.
Twenty-seven people listed ‘‘orange,’’ but only four people said they could
recognize an orange tree (without oranges hanging all over it, of course). On
average, the Pennsylvanians in Gatewood’s sample said they could recognize
half of the trees they listed. Gatewood calls this the loose talk phenomenon.
He thinks that many Americans can name a lot more things than they can
recognize in nature.
Does this loose talk phenomenon vary by gender? Suppose, Gatewood says,
we ask Americans from a variety of subcultures and occupations to list other
things besides trees. Would the 50% recognition rate hold?
Gatewood and a group of students at Lehigh University asked 54 university
students, half women and half men, to list all the musical instruments, fabrics,
hand tools, and trees they could think of. Then the informants were asked to
check off the items in each of their lists that they thought they would recognize
in a natural setting.
Gatewood chose musical instruments, with the idea that there would be no
gender difference in the number of items listed or recognized; he thought that
women might name more kinds of fabrics than would men and that men would
name more kinds of hand tools than would women. He chose the domain of
trees to see if his earlier findings would replicate. All the hypotheses were
supported (Gatewood 1984).
A. Kimball Romney and Roy D’Andrade asked 105 American high school
students to ‘‘list all the names for kinds of relatives and family members you
can think of in English’’ (1964:155). They were able to do a large number of
analyses on these data. For example, they studied the order and frequency of
recall of certain terms, and the productiveness of modifiers, such as ‘‘step-,’’
‘‘half-,’’ ‘‘-in-law,’’ ‘‘grand-,’’ ‘‘great-,’’ and so on. They assumed that the
nearer to the beginning of a list a kin term occurs, the more salient it is for
that particular informant. By taking the average position in all the lists for
each kin term, they were able to derive a rank order list of kin terms, according
to the variable’s saliency.
They also assumed that more salient terms occur more frequently. So, for
example, ‘‘mother’’ occurs in 93% of all lists and is the first term mentioned
on most lists. At the other end of the spectrum is ‘‘grandson,’’ which was only
mentioned by 17% of the 105 informants, and was, typically, the 15th, or last
term to be listed. They found that the terms ‘‘son’’ and ‘‘daughter’’ occur on
only about 30% of the lists. But remember, these informants were all high
school students, all of whom were sons and daughters, but none of whom had
sons or daughters. It would be interesting to repeat Romney and D’Andrade’s